


The Heavy Weight of Stone

by samyazaz



Series: The Subtle Grace of Gravity [3]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-08
Updated: 2016-09-08
Packaged: 2018-08-13 23:28:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7990177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samyazaz/pseuds/samyazaz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A prequel of sorts for <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/2546213">The Subtle Grace of Gravity</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Heavy Weight of Stone

**Author's Note:**

> **Content warnings:** This fic is set before the events of The Subtle Grace of Gravity and focuses on Grantaire through Floreal’s eyes before Enjolras and the others find him, so the fic comes with themes of depersonalization, medical horror, brainwashing/mind control, institutional abuse, and bystander syndrome as they appear or are implied in Gravity. There’s also one scene that gets a little bloody.

Floreal knows the stories, of course. She sat through the orientation videos when she was chosen for Security, same as everyone else did. She knows about the series of technical glitches and near-disasters that they suffered a few generations into their voyage, that Security refers to only as the Crisis. She knows the theory that was offered forth, that genetic computing might be the solution to their problems. She knows one of their own volunteered, that the conversion was a success and that the ship and everyone on it was saved.

That's what the orientation videos call it, the conversion, and she doesn't think too much of it. She thinks that man's a hero, and for the space of one video, they laud him as such.

And then in the next, they speak of the ship, and occasionally the ship's AI, but they make no mention of the man behind it all. It troubles her, but she bites her tongue. She was chosen for this position because she excelled in all of her lessons, because they decided she could be trusted with the responsibility of it. It's a coveted position, and she's young and green and too unsure of her place to speak up when everyone around her seems to take it for granted.

Eventually, she does, too. It's so easy to-- not to _forget_ , not that, but to grow complacent. To lapse back into her old linguistic patterns, and to adopt the patterns of those around her, to adopt the impersonal pronoun when referring to the ship and its systems.

She does well for herself in Security. Her superiors are pleased, and when she shows an aptitude for engineering and electronics, she's moved into the technical division. It's a lowly position to start with, but there will be opportunity to advance, and all her superiors are confident that she'll do so quickly.

She's not long into the new position when one day, while she's typing up her field report in the Security offices at the end of a shift, a deafening cacophany of alarms begin to blare, more all at once than she'd even known existed. She glances at one of the control mains and sees dozens of lights flashing there, most of them red and urgent, and the tech stationed there swearing beneath his breath as his hands fly over the controls.

She doesn't have time to ask what's going on when one of her superiors comes bursting out of his office. "Floreal," he snaps when he sees her there, and she stands at attention. "We need you for maintenance."

It's the end of her shift, she's supposed to be off in mere minutes, and she's hungry and tired and ready for her bunk, and there will be others coming on shift who are refreshed and able to take the assignment. But she knows this is the way she can elevate herself through Security's ranks, so she shays none of the things she's thinking, only gives a sharp nod and says, "Yes, sir. Just tell me where you need me."

He gives her coordinates to a place in the ship she's never been to before, and before she's able to consider the peculiarity of that too well, when she'd thought there wasn't a corridor or barrack in the ship she hadn't visited at some point in her career, he says, "One moment," and disappears back into his office.

He returns almost immediately and hands her a pair of eyeglasses. She lifts them up to look through them and finds that the lenses don't refract the light at all. They're flat, uncontoured, but tinted a grey so dark that scarcely any of the bright light of the Security offices passes through them.

"What--"

"You'll need them," he says, like that's all the information she needs, and then jerks his head at the door. "Go on. There's no time to waste."

"Yes, sir," she murmurs, and slides the glasses into a pocket as she hurries off to obey, the sounds of the alarms still ringing in her ears.

She comes to a locked corridor before she's reached her assignment's coordinates, the control panel flashing a warning that she attributes to the alarms sounding back in Security. Her Security code dismisses the warning and the doors his open to reveal another corridor, with another sealed pair of doors at its end, and another flashing warning telling her to turn back.

She mutters beneath her breath that her superiors might have at least cleared the way for her before sending her down on the assignment, but bypasses that as well and slips through the doors into the room beyond.

It's dark for the briefest of moments, a fraction of a fraction of a second, and then it's flooded with light that's blindingly bright, as searing as though they'd passed too close to a sun. Floreal fumbles out the shaded glasses before she's even able to register the thought, slips them on and sighs with relief when their heavy tinting turns the brilliant lights no brighter than any others to be found in any of the living spaces.

She has to wipe the tears from her eyes, but then she can see again, see perfectly, and she catches her breath as she sees a man before her, even at the same time as she hears a low human voice, moaning, "No no no no no no no. You can't be here, please go, please _go_."

"I'm from Security," she says in a low, soothing voice as she steps forward, falling back on her training. "I'm here to do maintenance." They trained her how to deal with aggressive or belligerent shipmates, they never prepared her for _this_.

She saw a man in Medical who'd suffered a catastrophic accident. She'd come into his room to repair a flickering light fixture so the physicians could do their work, and found him laid out on a bed, hooked up to a dozen machines that were performing the necessary functions of life for him. 

This man looks like that, but like the fractured, exaggerated nightmares she might have had of him. Wires and tubes come off of him in every direction, hundreds rather than dozens, but the greatest difference between the two men is that this one's standing upright, though he's hunched over like he wants to crouch or to fall but the wires and tubes limit his range of motion, and keep him upright. And he's moaning still, moaning, "Please go, just go, I don't want to hurt you, you shouldn't be here, please go while you can, it's not safe," like a mantra.

"Will you look at me?" she asks him quietly.

" _No."_ That's not a moan, it's delivered loudly, forcefully, and the lights behind the man flare even brighter, though she hadn't known that was possible.

Still, she can see the gold patterning across his skin, and she's in the technical division, she's seen the inner workings of the ship's systems enough to know circuitry when it's in front of her, though she's never seen it laid into a person's flesh like this, curved around the contours of muscle and bone rather than printed out out flat and even on silicon substrate.

_Conversion_ , she thinks, and wants to run out into the hall and be ill.

"I'm from Security," she tells him again, still low, still soothing. "I'm not going to hurt you."

He chokes on a hysterical laugh. "Of course you aren't."

That makes her pause and look at him, squinting even through the tinted glasses. She's not sure what he means by that, or how to interpret the particular quality of his voice. She's heard the sentiments before, usually delivered sarcastically from those with an antipathy or mistrust of Security, but it's not sarcasm in this man's voice. It's something else, something she can't quite put her finger on. Still, the Security training is thorough, and she falls back on that because she doesn't know what else to do, tells him again, "I'm a tech. Something broke, and they sent me to repair it," because usually even those who have misgivings about Security will granted her access once they realize she's there to make repairs, and not in any way capable of authorizing detainment.

It does give the man pause, though she didn't really expect it to. He angles his head to the side and lifts his gaze just enough to look her over curiously, toes to neck and back down again, but never high enough to meet her eye. "They...they _sent_  you?" Now, his voice wavers with uncertainty. "Is it a punishment?" And with that, his words are frayed, and desperate with fear.

"That's not really my department. I just fix things. I didn't come here to punish you." He's the ship, she can't imagine why they would ever need or want to punish him in the first place, but that doesn't matter right now. 

He laughs again, less hysterical but still choked and mirthless. "No, I mean. Did they send you here to _be_  punished?"

That gives her pause. She looks at him again, looks at him closer, takes in the anguish and reluctance in his expression. "Do they do that?"

His throat works in silence for a moment. "I don't know. I don't know if they're sent. But sometimes people come."

"And?"

His face is all anguish, now. "They see me," he says, his voice breaking on every other word. "And they die, or go mad. Or blind, sometimes. If they're lucky. The last one went blind." And he says it like it's a relief, like it's a _gift_ , that the last one went blind. That he _only_ went blind.

"I see you," she says, and isn't expecting the violence of the reaction that gets. He throws himself back from her and the lights climb so bright that Floreal's blinded, even through the glasses, and she can feel the heat coming off of them as though from a flame. "Stop! That's not my point. I _see you_ , and I'm not blind, or mad, or dead."

He stops, quivering, sending the wires shaking where they arc from him to the wall. "How?" His voice is harsh, torn. "It's not possible."

"I don't know," she says, and wonders if there's something about the glasses. "But I've got a job to do. Do you mind?"

He doesn't assent, but he doesn't stop her either. He turns his head to follow her progress around the room, studying her as though she's something strange and exotic, though she's quite sure that any one of her barrack-mates would have told him that she was the least interesting of the bunch.

She finds the problem quick enough, a leak in one of his tubes that's getting fluid in his wiring and caused a short. It's no wonder all those alarms were going off. She patches it in moments, and puts in a work order on her 'screen to have it replaced before it can cause trouble again, though her 'screen decides to take that opportunity to inform her that it can't establish a connection with the wireless, and the report will be sent once it has.

"Stupid useless piece of junk, I've been trying to requisition a new unit for ages but _no_ , you always have to work perfectly when they take you in for evaluation," she mutters at the device, then quickly stows away her tools.

She doesn't quite know how to say good-bye to him. They don't usually bother on maintenance runs. That seems inappropriate here, but she doesn't know what else to do, or to say. And so, with nothing else to fall back on, she falls instead on her training, and gives him the standard line, "Thank you for your accommodation. Please file a report with Security if you find the issue isn't resolved," and turns and walks away, making faces to herself all the way down the long corridors because what a ridiculous, inane thing to say to him. He's _the ship_.

The alarms have stopped by the time she gets back to the office, and she's dismissed and given her next shift off in exchange for the long hours she's worked today. Usually she'd use any extra time she's given to sleep, and today she's exhausted enough from the shift and from the encounter that she ought to be asleep as soon as her head hits the pillow.

Instead, she finds herself tossing and turning, until at last she gives up on the pretense, pulls the blankets up over her head to shield the rest of her barrack-mates from the light, and opens her 'screen. She pulls up the videos from orientation. She'd saved all of them for reference, just in case she found need of them, though she hasn't touched them in longer than she can remember. She digs until she finds the ones about the Crisis, and the man who volunteered to save them all.

She watches his interviews, his psych evals, all the supplementary videos that they'd been given but not required to watch. It's the same man, she can see that now, though she hadn't recognized him before. It had been too long since orientation, too long since she'd bothered to review her notes and materials.

He doesn't have the wires or the tubes, though, or the haunted, desperate look she'd seen in his eyes only a few hours before. He doesn't have the circuitry, either. He looks like anybody else she might work with on any given day, in his pressed blue uniform and with his hair curling into his eyes. He laughs at one of the questions posed to him in one of the interview videos, ducks his head and scratches a hand through his hair like he's shy or embarrassed or maybe just naturally talented at being endearing. _He looks nice_ , she thinks, and tries to remember that he made a choice, that he volunteered, that he's a hero and she should admire him, not pity him.

Eventually, her eyelids grow heavy and she shuts the 'screen off and tries to sleep, and tries not to dream of wirebound nightmare-men with haunted eyes and halos bright enough to blind.

*

It's a few months before she's sent down there again, and this time there aren't any dramatic warnings or lights going off, but she is given the work order in the same clipped, urgent tone as before. 

This time, only the outer set of doors are barred to her. The inner are already disengaged and open and there are people inside, two figures in Security uniforms bent over a third who's lying sprawled on the floor, and who's not Security, and who has thick trails of blood coming from his eyes and his ears and his nostrils.

His eyes are open, vacant and unmoving, and he hangs like a child's doll between the two men as they lift him up and start to bear him out.

"What," Floreal gasps, all the air knocked out of her lungs.

The nearest of the Security officers glances at her, takes in her uniform and her insignia, and jerks his head over his shoulder, back towards the room inside. "Don't mind the mess, they'll send a cleanup crew down for that. But you're here for the calibration, right?"

Equipment recalibration, that's what the work order had said, and she'd thought they'd meant wiring or machinery, but it occurs to her belatedly to wonder if they hadn't meant the man. The ship itself. _Himself_.

She gives an acknowledging nod and steps past the puddle of blood on the floor, fighting down her gag reflex. The Security officers are higher ranked than she is, and she doesn't want word getting back to her superiors that she isn't equipped for the job.

Inside, she finds the man in hysterics, slumped so hard against his wiring that they're pulled tight, the only thing keeping him even semi-upright. He's sobbing, his face a mess of tears and blotchy red as he cries brokenly, "I didn't mean to, I didn't mean to, I told him to go, I couldn't stop it--"

He notices her abruptly, and scrambles back as best he can with the wires tethering him. "No, no, go, please, I can't, not _twice_ —"

"You don't hurt me. Don't you remember?"

His head hangs between his shoulders, as though he hasn't the strength to hold it up any longer. "I hurt everybody," he says miserably. "Please go. I don't want to, but I can't stop it."

"I have work to do," she tells him briskly, because it's easier to fall back on professionalism than it is to figure out what to do about this crying, inconsolable man in front of her, who can't even remember that she's been here before, and left unscathed.

She pulls up the work order and opens the file with the list of calibrations that need to be done. She's always done it this way — there's no point, it seems to her, in scratching her head over schematics when she knows the instructions will make more sense to her when she's got the actual piece of machinery in front of her. It's just the way she's wired.

It seems inevitable when she opens the file and the calibrations listed have nothing to do with timing sequences or mechanical tolerances. _Adjust prolactin -5, corticotropin -10, serotonin +3, increase sedatives until homeostasis is achieved._ Her fingers tighten around the 'screen, and she has to take a series of long, deep breaths to control the sudden, visceral clenching in her gut.

For a brief moment, she considers appending a comment to the work order, telling her superiors, _I'm tech, not medical, damn it!_ , considers just turning on her heel and walking out and refusing the assignment.

They'd detain her if she did, undoubtedly. Come up with a reason for it, a name for it. They'd call it mutiny, perhaps, or insubordination. She wonders if they'd tell her that he's equipment, he's the ship, so of course he falls under her purview. Either way, she'd lose everything.

It's not what decides her, in the end. She doesn't do it for them. She does it for the man on his knees on the floor in front of her, wracked with sobs of grief and terror. It's the only comfort she can give him.

She moves to the wall behind him, the banks of processors and machinery that control the flow of electrons and medications and nutrients. She adjusts prolactin, corticotropin, serotonin. Her fingers tremble a little as she hears him behind her, his sobs easing, the long, weary breath that he takes, like his grief is a pool he was drowning in, and finally broke the surface on.

Her hand hovers over the medication controls, but she can't bring herself to make the adjustment that would flood his system with sedatives. He's calmer now, at least. He's not going to tear the wires from his skin in the throes of his grief. Isn't that enough?

She shuts the control panel and turns. He's still not looking at her, but he's not scrambling to get away from her or begging her not to let him kill her, either. He acts as though he scarcely realizes she's there. It's something, at least. 

The standard Security valediction feels like dust on her tongue, choking her. She can't say that to him, not now. It was ridiculous before. This time, she thinks it would be cruel. She has to walk past him to leave, and she pauses just beside him, but doesn't touch him. She doesn't think he would like that. "Be well," she says to him quietly, and doesn't stay long enough to hear more than the hitching intake of his breath.

*

It takes her a week to work up the courage to ask, nervous roiling in her stomach because she's got a good thing here, a good position and good prospects for advancement, and she could ruin it all by being too nosy. She wasn't chosen for Security because of her curiosity, she was chosen for her technical aptitude and because she's always shown a healthy respect for authority.

But she can't help herself. It eats at her, until one day there's an opportune moment, a quiet moment in the office where it's just her and her superior, and she's meant to be leaving for the day but she hesitates. 

He looks up at her, raises a brow and says, "Yes?" like he's willing to be patient for the moment, but his patience will only extend so far.

She takes a breath, lets it out in a rush, and then takes another to fortify herself. "I had a question, sir. About-- about that calibration assignment."

She can see on his face that he knows what she means. He settles back with a sigh and a frown, and it's not foreboding exactly, but it holds the threat that it might become so very easily. "Yes?"

"He-- That is. I've had an assignment there once before, but when I went last week, he didn't remember me." He was the _ship_ , shouldn't he remember everything? Wasn't that his whole function, the purpose of all that fancy genomic programming, because he could store so much more data within his very cells than they could in silicon drives even if they packed the whole ship with them?

A gesture, the dismissive wave of a hand, draws her attention back to the man before her, the man who writes her evals every quarter and who has a great deal of control over her ability to rise through the ranks and make a name and a position for herself. "We scrub the files of that sector, after servicing. It's tidier that way."

Her breath freezes for a moment at the easy, cavalier way he talks about _erasing a person's memories_. But then she thinks of that man so many decks below their feet, limp as a child's doll and sobbing with more grief and despair than one heart should be able to hold, a man's death on his conscience as he babbled incoherently that he hadn't meant to, that he had tried not to, for all the good it had done him. And she thinks maybe -- maybe it's a blessing, to have that taken from him. To forget what had happened, and not have to live an eternity with the regret.

"I see. Thank you, sir," she says, and takes her leave, and doesn't mention it again to anyone.

*

It's several more months before she's sent to him again. For the first weeks, she can't help but think of him. She pulls up his videos when she's off-shift and watches them again, watches as the physician performing his psych eval asks him why he wants to do this and he gives his answer. She reminds herself that he volunteered for this, and who is she to decide how much a man can choose to sacrifice? They'd all be dead now if he hadn't, desiccated husks floating endlessly through space until some star's gravity captured them and pulled them down to the inferno at its heart. Eventually she even starts to believe herself, lulled by the structure and monotony and the routine of her daily existence. Complacency is like a drug, slick and sweet and subtle, and it's so much easier to let herself be intoxicated than to fight against its effects.

Then the order comes, and she sees the coordinates and she has to take a moment to breathe carefully before she gives away her thoughts with her reaction.

There's no mention of calibration, at least. It's a small mercy. Something about a burst pipe, an easy task to replace. Anyone could do it, but she doesn't complain about the grunt work.

She lets herself in and the lights go bright again, blinding. He cries out like he always does, begging her to leave. She doesn't have the heart to argue with him about it again, and he's just going to forget it anyway, isn't he? So what's the point? Even if she convinces him this time, she'll just have to start over again the next. 

She does tell him, "You're not going to hurt me," over her shoulder as she gets to work, though, because it's an easy enough thing to give him, and maybe it'll provide some reassurance. 

He gives a laughing sob. "I am, though. I will. I hurt everyone. Should I tell you about the last person who came in here, and what I did to him?"

"If you like," she says absently, because she doesn't have the stomach for this either. She moves through the room until she's located the wall panel that the leak is located behind, and starts working to unfasten it.

"I killed him," he says, almost savagely. "His eardrums burst, and his eyes too, maybe, and he died screaming in a pool of his own blood. I didn't even touch him, he just looked at me, so _please_ \--"

Floreal turns and stares at him, her tools forgotten in her hand.

_"No,"_ he snarls, and the lights flare to blinding again. "Aren't you even _listening_ to me?"

She is, though. She _is_. He killed the last one, he said. But the first time she'd come here, he'd told her that the last person to see him, he'd blinded. "Do you remember me?" she asks him abruptly.

He gives a hollow laugh. "Of course not. Everyone who sees me dies."

They wiped his memory files, that's what she'd been told, and she'd thought-- oh, stupid girl, she'd assumed they meant all of them. But they hadn't. They didn't.

They left him the memories of the times he'd hurt. The times he'd killed. They only wiped the memories of the times he _hadn't_.

She turns on her heel, back to the open wall panel behind her, and takes her wrench and starts working at the broken pipe. She's abruptly, fiercely glad for the physical labor, for the opportunity to throw her weight into her task, because it helps alleviate the sudden desire that's seized her, to take her pipe and her wrench and hurl them at the head of her superior. 

He's quiet behind her while she works, only the ragged rhythm of his breathing lets her know he's there at all. She wonders if it's because she has her back to him, because she can't look at him. It's the looking that's the danger, he said. 

She's careful while she works, then, to ensure that she can keep her back to him. She doesn't wish to cause him any more distress than she already has, and more, she doesn't think she _can_ look at him right now. Not without wanting to cry, and he might not remember it in a day, but she wouldn't ever be able to forget.

Replacing the pipe is the work of a few moments. She checks the system, runs tests and diagnostics to ensure that the seals hold and the leak is gone, and then she packs up her things. And then, there's really nothing to do but to draw a breath for courage and turn around.

" _Don't_ , stars, why don't you listen at all--" He throws the lights up bright, but she makes her way out by feel and by memory. When she's through the doors, she seals them behind her, then leans back against them and slides down to the floor, her face in her hands, her breathing wet and frayed.

_He chose this. He consented to this,_ she tells herself firmly, and the voice in her head sounds like her instructors, and like her superiors. It steadies her, a little. She's always been good at obeying authority.

Still she wonders, as she pulls herself to her feet and dries her cheeks and tugs her uniform until it's straight and pristine. She wonders just how much they've taken from him, and how much they've left. She wonders if he remembers making that choice, and she wonders how much his consent matters, if he can't remember giving it.

She returns to the Security offices and her superior glances at her as she gives her report, and doesn't take a second look. The thing about authority is, no one's good at respecting it _all_ the time. Everyone has their moments of weakness or rebelliousness. The thing you have to be good at is faking it, and she's very, very good at putting on the face people expect to see, and say the things they want to hear. She knows how to hide the tears that dripped down her cheeks and the doubts that gnaw at the edges of her mind.

*

In the end, she's wrong about one thing: it's so easy to forget. 

It's three days before she can report for a shift without her stomach tying in knots, and a week until her coworker makes a joke and she laughs without having to fake it or force it. And then it's easy because everything -- almost everything -- is the same. She's done this job and known these people for years, and despite herself, complacency finds her, works its way back into her veins and lulls her right back into the comfort of rhythm and routine.

Still, sometimes she presses a hand to the wall when the engines rev or stutter beneath their feet, and she wonders what's happening to him, she wonders if it's happiness or distress. She wonders if they'll sedate him for it, and then quickly turns her thoughts away to something else.

She can't bear to watch the videos too often now, but sometimes, when sleep is hard to come by, she'll bury herself deep beneath her blankets and pull one up, and watch him laugh and smile and joke, and she'll feel the quiet vibrations that run through the ship and up the legs of her bed and into her bones, and she'll tell herself that it's for the best. That he's keeping hundreds of thousands of people alive. And that there's nothing to be done about it anyways. She wouldn't know how to even begin to defy Security like that, and if she tried they'd throw her in detainment in a heartbeat. They're too great a force, and she's so small and so easily crushed.

Still in the dark silence of the night, with the engines' vibrations humming through her bones and a video on her 'screen paused on the bright flash of his smile, she works one hand out from beneath her blankets and reaches down to press it against the floor. And she makes a decision, a small, quiet choice of her own: that she'll always remember to think of the ship as _he_ and _him_ and _his_. That she won't let complacency lure her so deep that she goes back to those old linguistic patterns and familiar habits, of calling the ship _it_ like there isn't a living man at its heart, carrying them all on to safety in the palm of his hand. She promises herself she'll remember, at least that much. It isn't much, but it's all she knows how to do.

**Author's Note:**

> I am really really sorry. Feel free come yell at me on [tumblr](http://samyazaz.tumblr.com), I will be happy to grovel and make emotional faces with you about all my Floreal and Grantaire feels


End file.
